She nodded. “He phoned me last night, Nic. Said he wanted to talk. Said I had to dye my hair like this so that he’d know me. Not that that makes any sense, of course.” Her face went down, close to his chest. “I just wasn’t thinking.”
He looked at the walls again and knew: this was the place, the scene of the photographs, one room of several in Randolph Kirk’s seedy subterranean pleasure palace, each with a bed, each with a history. And in one Eleanor Jamieson had surely died.
She put a hand to his head. “Are you all right? I heard him hit you. It sounded horrible.”
“I’m fine,” he said, and took her hands, looked hard into her frightened eyes. “Miranda. We need to work out how to get out of here. I don’t know what this guy’s up to but it isn’t good.”
There were so many threads of possibilities running inside his head. He didn’t know which was true, which imagination. Neri on the run, fleeing the evidence left at his accountant’s. The bomb outside the old hood’s house. How in spite of that he’d pressed Peroni so hard to chase the sighting of Suzi even though his colleagues lay stricken and wounded on the ground around him. Was this a kind of treachery? It seemed the right decision at the time. Just now, though, his head refused to clear sufficiently to understand what had happened afterwards.
She took his hands and looked earnestly into his face. “Listen to me, Nic. He’s desperate somehow. He just wants money.”
“How much?” It wasn’t the question he wanted to ask.
“Pretty much everything I have. Not that it matters.” She sighed and looked down at the bed. “I got the impression that perhaps his plans had changed. To be honest with you I don’t care. Suzi’s alive. I saw her. She was here before he threw me into this dump. I just want her free. I’d give everything I’ve got for that.”
He tried to remember now: perhaps there were two female voices in the darkness last night, before he was struck down.
“Where is she now?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “This place seems to be full of rooms like this. Perhaps he just likes using them. Perhaps—”
Her face darkened and he knew what she was thinking.
“Perhaps it’s not just about the money after all,” she continued. “I don’t care so long as I have her back. I had to make some calls back home to organize the money. Maybe he’s keeping her somewhere just to make sure I haven’t pulled any tricks. She’s collateral. If she’s lucky. I’m sorry, Nic. I know I should have called. But—”
Her eyes bored into him, blue, unrepentant. “I knew what you’d do. You’d turn this into a cop thing. I couldn’t take that risk. And it’s just money.”
Costa took the phone out of his jacket and looked at the screen again. It was still dead. He stared around the room trying to think of some way to escape.
“We can’t get out, Nic,” she whispered. “I tried. We’re here till he comes back. What kind of place is this?”
Her mouth was so close to his neck he could feel her breath, damp, hot, alive. She was shivering against him.
“A kind of temple, maybe?”
“To what?”
He knew that instinctively. They both did. “To losing it.”
In spite of everything she was calm now in some way he couldn’t quite comprehend. Perhaps it was simply knowing that Suzi was alive.
She shivered violently. His arms went round her. Miranda Julius reached down and took out a small silver pill case from her bag then shook two tiny tablets, sugar-coated and red, into her palm.
“I need these,” she said, shaking. Her eyes closed, her white, perfect neck went back. Costa couldn’t stop looking at her, feeling her pain and her need, pinioned to the bed by her agonised beauty.
It happened swiftly. She moved fully into his arms. Her slender hand gripped the hair at the nape of his neck. Her mouth closed on his, soft, wet and enticing. He responded. Their lips joined. Her tongue ran beyond his teeth, her hands beginning to tear at his shirt, firing something red and senseless in his imagination.
He thought he heard her whisper his name, then the tongue returned, probing, hard, insistent, finding the deepness in his throat. There was just the hint of something solid on the tip, something that made him swallow and, in the heat of the moment, scarcely notice the act.
Nic Costa closed his eyes, not thinking, letting her hands do their work, rising when he was bidden, feeling her straddle him, panting, demanding, feeling the heat rise between them, drowning out the doubts in his head.
In the fevered stream of his imagination painted figures watched from the walls, eyes bright, gaping mouths laughing, particles of dead, dry dust coming alive, waiting for the ancient siren song to rise in her throat, waiting for the ecstasy to bind them.
At some point afterwards he closed his eyes and slept. When he woke she was quietly singing a line from an old song, one his father possessed among that ancient pile of vinyl back in the farmhouse off the old Appian Way. He recognized it: Grace Slick fronting Jefferson Airplane, all those years ago. Miranda Julius was softly chanting the same refrain over and over again.
“One pill makes you bigger,” she sang in a low, breathy voice that ran through his head like a dream.
“HE’S OFFERING me what?”
Emilio Neri couldn’t believe his ears. Maybe he’d misjudged the kid all along. It was now almost eight thirty. He’d just finished breakfast in the cellar of the safe house on the Aventine Hill, after the best solitary night’s sleep that he could remember in years. Bruno Bucci made the choice. Neri had forgotten he even owned the place. The radio and TV stations were now blurting out his name as the chief culprit for the previous night’s bomb blast. One of the newspapers had even put up a reward for anyone who helped track him down. None of this worried him. Bucci was a good guy. He’d done his homework. He’d paid the right people, sealed the lips of those who might be tempted to go for the main chance. The Albanian mob reckoned they could spirit Neri out of the country late that afternoon. By midnight he’d be in North Africa. In a couple of days he’d find himself in Capetown, ready for a little holiday, in preparation for the trip across the southern Atlantic to his new home. Once he was beyond his native shores no one could touch him. A long line of money would grease his path all the way, from one understanding state to the next.
But now, as luck would have it, a little temptation had got in the way, and Emilio Neri knew the moment he heard it nothing would induce him to walk away from Mickey’s offer.
“Tell me again,” he said. “Just so I know I’m not dreaming.”
Bucci grimaced, unhappy with the idea from the outset. “If you forgive him, if you let him and Adele live, you can have Wallis on a plate. He just wants some money, that’s all. And some guarantees.”
“Guarantees?” Neri waddled around the room, shaking his head. “Tell you what. Get him back on the phone. Let me talk to the kid. I’ll give him guarantees. Why didn’t he call me direct anyway? I’m his father, aren’t I?”
Bucci shook his head. “He won’t speak with you, boss. He’s pissed off with you. Says you expected Toni Martelli to off him last night. Seems to think that was an insult or something.”
“Yeah.” Neri laughed. “Maybe it was. But Martelli’s dead and he’s alive. So where’s the insult now? How much does he want?”
“A cut of the action,” Bucci said gloomily. “Ten per cent of everything going forward.”
Neri slapped Bucci cheerfully around the cheeks. “Hey, don’t look so miserable, Bruno. There’s plenty to go round. Be realistic. Nothing’s ever fixed in stone, now, is it?”
“Whatever you want, boss.” Bruno Bucci said that a lot, Neri thought. It could get annoying.